Karmanjakah: Conscious Transcendence

KARMANJAKAH have swiftly become a band people have fallen in love with. Since their album A Book About Itself released in 2021, fans have been eagerly awaiting more music. We caught up with vocalist Jonas Lundquist and guitarist Viggo Örsan about their new EP Ancient Skills.

While the band have undoubtedly cultivated a distinct sound of their own, they’ve been pretty free and experimental with how they approached the creation of this set of songs. “To me, it’s more about if we’re doing what we enjoy,” Viggo tells us, “We’re kind of internally thinking about what we want to say and how we want it to sound and I think that it’s going to come out in new ways without even trying to think about it. When you’re listening to your heart, I feel like we can create in a genuine way, and make good decisions for the music.”

It’s no surprise that nothing KARMANJAKAH has done is by the numbers. The band never want to rest of their laurels because people might like a sound or an approach to playing. Having no set formula is the thing that keeps creating interesting. “Yeah, and I think that’s what’s beautiful about music,” Viggo notes. He goes on interestingly to compare another passion with the way KARMANJAKAH approach making Ancient Skills. “I really like to cook food, that’s one of my main passions outside of music. And I hate recipes. Like, I hate recipes, because I feel that, to me, it kills the exciting thing about cooking something. To me, it’s more about getting a feel for something, and I feel same when I write music. When I’m playing guitar in the band, if I feel like everybody expects me to do a certain thing, or to play a certain part a certain way, I feel a little claustrophobic. It kills my passion a little bit. I don’t want to feel like I have understood what we’re doing or what music is. So, to me, it’s one of the fun things about playing music that you’re pretty much doing the same thing, but if you do it in a different way, it feels so new.”

“Yeah, it’s exactly like following a recipe,” Jonas adds. “It’s easy because you don’t have to think. If you’re gonna try to do without, you have to put in like a lot more of yourself. There’s lot more work to it, more cognition and creativity.”

In the same vein, Jonas tells us a little more about the details of song writing. The EP is packed with little intricacies and changes that make up a wealth of textures. The lush complexity of the songs wasn’t necessarily something that the guys were consciously pursuing. Rather, it seems that their experimentation and steadfastness to following through on the process is what made such a rich collection of tracks. “We were just thinking about ways to do stuff, like with the song Listening, thinking of ways to make the song work,” Jonas recalls. “And then at some point, we were just like, ‘nah, man, we committed to this idea’. We just had to go with it and hold ourselves accountable for this idea.”

“Now, we couldn’t just sort of try to squeeze it into some working arrangement that would be sort of pleasing, but we just had to go all in all in on this idea. I guess we got a little bit braver than we’ve maybe been before, that was really cool. Because it’s as soon as you sort of accept that, ‘okay, this might just be a little bit weird, we’re just gonna go with’, it feels really nice. I think it became a bit different and really, really cool. I like it a lot.”

KARMANJAKAH have manged to approach Ancient Skills with the mindset of making each song as great as it can be, while also being experimental and respectful of the artforms they’re playing around with. “Yeah, it’s like the same kind of authenticity that you would want to keep when you’re experimenting,” says Jonas, “I guess you can’t just take something and make it your own. You’d have to process it a little bit. But also, I think it can’t just be a gimmick, either; you can’t just do something necessarily because the idea itself is cool. I feel like you still need to write the really good song.”

The band have always had a really tight, well thought out way of constructing music, never looking to trod the same ground twice. As mentioned, KARMANJAKAH aren’t into gimmicks, but are interested in the learning and bettering of their process as they continue. That obviously includes the musical styles that they have touched on throughout Ancient Skills.

“I guess we are very passionate about how we actually incorporate influences from other stuff into the music, and that’s a very difficult skill to develop,” Viggo clarifies. “It requires a lot of research and a lot of understanding. And, that’s something that both me and [Jonas] want to do a lot. Like, for instance, with Listening with that kind of Middle Eastern part required a lot of research from my end- performing that part, like understanding how we actually play that stuff, maybe taking lessons or getting in contact with players from that area of the world and trying to understand, how would an authentic player from this part of the world actually perform this part? And it comes down to very minute details about how you perform it.”

“I think that it’s the same with the song Breathing,” Viggo continues. “That has influences from Indian folk music, and reggae. If you’re going to dabble with those things, you really need to know what you’re doing. And I think that it’s an exciting kind of part of playing music and that really does connect back to what we were talking about earlier about being authentic.”

Working on authenticity also requires self-discovery and learning about new perspectives. “I started reading a little bit about mysticism,” Jonas explains. “I’ve considered myself an atheist for most of my life, but I find it quite interesting to challenge my prejudice against religion. That sort of got me thinking about how are we in the Western world. We made a lot of technological advancements and we’ve made them really quickly. I feel like maybe the ordinary person has maybe discarded the thousands of years of development in terms of spirituality. That old knowledge and wisdom that could help us, but that we tend to discard just because it’s not scientific.”

“That resulted in these four skills, which are really old skills and really old methods of reaching some kind of enlightenment; different ways of contemplation in enriching that enlightenment.” The subsequent songs have a self-reflective quality to them, as well as incorporating that respectful curation of knowledge the band have developed in their exploration. Be it through spiritual contemplation or cultivating new musical skills, Ancient Skills boasts some of KARMANJAKAH’s best work yet.

Ancient Skills is out now via self release.

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